Despite the global chip shortage, AMD is still on track to launch laptops with RDNA2 graphics later this quarter, according to company CEO Lisa Su.
She made the comment during an earnings call on Tuesday while later acknowledging chip supplies remain tight. “The inventories are very low throughout the entire supply chain,” Su said. “There’s quite more we would like to be able to do.”
However, the company is making progress in churning out more product, including AMD desktop graphics cards. This has involved the company investing in its own “substrate capacity” dedicated to AMD.
“It’s fair to say the graphics demand is very high across the marketplace. So we’ve actually put a quite a bit of product in the market, but the demand still exceeds supplies,” she added. “You’ll see that increase as we go through the second half of the year.”
AMD’s upcoming laptop graphics technology will use the same architecture found in the recently-launched Radeon RX 6000 desktop GPUs and in Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X.
During last month’s Radeon RX 6700 XT unveiling, AMD briefly teased the laptop GPUs, saying they’ll be named the RX 6000 Series laptops.
For Q1, AMD reported impressive growth. The company’s revenue grew 93 percent year-over-year to $3.45 billion. Meanwhile, net income soared by 243 percent.
AMD credited the surging sales to the company’s “best product portfolio” in its history. On the personal computing front, the company’s Ryzen 5000 CPUs and new Radeon graphics cards helped AMD rake in $2.1 billion, a year-over-year increase of 46 percent.
The other big sales driver was AMD’s “Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom” business, which not only includes servers, but also chips for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. The business grew by a massive 286 percent year-over-year, pulling in $1.35 billion.
In contrast, Intel’s own revenue for Q1 dropped by 1 percent year-over year. However, the company still dwarfs AMD in terms of total business. Intel’s revenue for the quarter raked in $19.7 billion in sales, almost six times more.
Nevertheless, AMD says more server vendors and PC manufacturers are picking the company’s chips. The number of laptops based on the AMD Ryzen 5000 and Ryzen Pro 5000 mobile chips is on track to increase by 50 percent compared to the last generation, according to AMD.
“For the full year 2021, AMD now expects revenue growth of approximately 50 percent over 2020 driven by growth in all businesses, up from prior guidance of approximately 37 percent annual growth,” the chip maker added.
